The Perils of Pauline Part 16

It was a picture that might well have startled a less impetuous heart than Pauline's. Harry's hand still clasped Lucille's, and he was leaning toward her in the eagerness of his appeal.

"You, will? You promise? Lucille, you've made me happy," Pauline heard him say.

Through mist-dimmed eyes, dizzily, she saw the two arise. She saw the man she loved clasp Lucille's other hand. She saw the girl who had been her friend and confidante since childhood draw herself away from him with a lingering withdrawal that could mean--ah, what could it not mean? Polly fled to her room.

In Owen's subtle secret battle to retain control of the Marvin millions fate had never so befriended him. None of all the weapons or ruses that he had used to prevent the faithful attachment of Harry and Pauline was as potent as this little seed of jealousy.

Pauline rang for her maid.

"Tell Miss Hamlin that I am not at home," she said in a voice that started haughtily but ended in a sob.

"But, Miss Marvin--" Margaret tried to demur.

"Tell Miss Hamlin that I am not at home," repeated Pauline.

Lucille had just started up the stairs, leaving Harry with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.

"Well, even if I caret do anything with that wild woman," she laughed back at him, "you know Pauline bears a charmed life. Nothing has ever happened to her yet. Guardian angels surround her--as well as heroes."

Harry walked into the library. The agitated Margaret met Lucille on the stairs.

"Miss Marvin is--Miss Marvin is not at home," the girl said, flushing crimson.

Lucille paused, dumfounded.

"But, Margaret, you know I thought--I really thought she was, at home, Miss Hamlin. I hope you won't be offended with me."

"I insist upon seeing her," cried Lucille. "I don't believe you are telling me the truth. I'm going right up to her room."

Margaret burst into tears.

Lucille quickly reconsidered. Indignation took the place of astonishment. She hurried down the stairs and rushed through the door without waiting for Margaret to open it.

Pauline, back in her own room, vented her first rage in tears. With her hot face pressed against the pillow, she sobbed out the agony of what she thought her betrayal--her double betrayal, by courtier and comrade at once. But the tears pa.s.sed. Too vital was the spirit in her, too red flowing in her veins was the blood of fighting ancestors, too strong the fortress of self-command within the blossoming gardens of her youth and beauty for the word surrender ever to come to her mind.

True, she had found an adventure that stirred her more deeply than the peril of land or sea or sky could have done. Here was a thrill that had never been listed among her intended tremors. She sent for Owen.

Masked as ever in his suave exterior and his manner of mingled obsequiousness and fatherliness, he came instantly.

"Mr. Owen, have you known--have you known that this was going on?"

"I feel that it is my duty to know what concerns you--even what concerns your happiness, Miss Marvin," he answered.

"You mean?"

"I mean that I have long had my suspicions."

But again the very perfection of his deceit brought Pauline that feeling that she had had since childhood that sense of an insidious influence always surrounding her, always menacing and yet never revealed. This influence, which Owen seemed to embody, was the antagonist of that other mysterious power, so real and yet so inexplicable, that warded and protected her--the spirit of the girl that had stepped from the mummy.

But Pauline had seen with her own eyes; she did not need any word of Owen's to convince her of the falsity of her lover.

She was quite calm now. She dressed with the utmost care. Margaret, who had seen her in such anger only a short time before, was surprised at her sprightliness and graciousness. A slightly heightened color that only added to the l.u.s.ter of her loveliness, was the single sign of her inward thoughts. She summoned her own car and left the house alone.

The drawing room of the Clarence Courtelyou mansion was ablaze with light. There was a little too much light. The Clarence Courtelyou always had a little too much of everything.

There was a little too much money; there was a little too much gold leaf decoration in the drawing room, a little too much diamond decoration of Mrs. Courtelyou, and, if you were so fastidiously impolite as to say so, a little too much of Mrs. Courtelyou herself.

But Mrs. Courtelyou was struggling toward gentility in such an amiable way that better people liked her. The motherliness and sweet sincerity of her--the fact that she loved her frankly illiterate husband and worshipped, almost from afar, her cultured daughters was the thing that brought her down from the base height of the "climbers" and lifted her kindly, harmless personality to the high simplicities of the elite.

She made the natural mistake that other wealthy mendicants at the outer portals of society have made the mistake of pounding at the gates.

Instead of letting the splendor of her charitable gifts, the gracefulness of her simplicity, carry her through, she went in for the gorgeous and the costly.

As a sort of crowning glory she began to "take up" artists and actors and musicians. She gained the good graces of the best of them, and in her kindly innocence she won the worship of the worst.

It was thus that she came to the point of holding a reception for Baskinelli.

Not that any one had heard anything black, or even shadowy, against Baskinelli. He had arrived recently from abroad, his foreign fame preceding him, his prospective conquests of America fulsomely foretold, his low brow decorated in advance with laurel.

Mrs. Courtelyou added him to her collection with the swiftness and directness of the entomologist discovering a new bug. She herself loved music--without understanding it very deeply--and Baskinelli, whatever might be his other gifts, could summon all the cadences of love from the machines that people call a piano--engine of torture or instrument of joy.

For half an hour Harry paced at the foot of the stairs.

"I wonder if she's ever coming," he fumed to himself. "It takes 'em so long to do it that they drive you crazy, and when it's done they're so wonderful that they drive you crazy."

"Did you--did you wish anything, sir?" asked the butler, entering.

"No--just waiting for Miss Pauline, Jenkins--just waiting," sighed Harry.

"Why--if I may presume to tell you, sir--Miss, Marvin has gone to the reception," said Jenkins.

"Gone!" Harry cried abruptly, hotly, then remembered that he was speaking to a servant and swung into the reception room.

He put on his hat and coat and rang for Jenkins again.

"How long ago was it that Miss Pauline went out?"

"Almost an hour ago, sir."

Harry slammed his way out of the door. It was not until he was in the car on his way to the Courtelyous that he began to think--began to think with utterly wrong deductions, as lovers always do.

"I must have said too much," he told himself. "She's crazy about these wild pranks and she thinks I'm a stupid goody-goody. What a fool I was to try to prevent her!"

"You aren't very nice, Mr. Marvin, to snub my pet musician--my very newest pet musician," Mrs. Courtelyou rebuked him, as he entered.

"I didn't mean it. I was waiting for--why, my car went to pieces,"

he explained. "Is Pauline here?"

"Here? She is the only person present. Baskinelli hasn't spoken a word to any one else. He won't play anything unless she suggests the subject. I am glad Mr. Owen is here to protect her."